Tessa Kelly
Tessa Kelly is a co-founder of ARCADE, an architectural office in Pittsfield, MA, whose mission is to use design as a platform to create and support culture in disinvested, de-industrialized cities. She is also the creator of The Mastheads, a public humanities project in Pittsfield that uses five mobile writing studios to ignite new programming about the city's literary heritage. Tessa Kelly is a graduate of Williams College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has taught in the graduate program at the Yale School of Architecture.
ARCADE's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, displayed at MASS MoCA and Hancock Shaker Village, and featured in Dwell Magazine and the Boston Globe. Clients include Williams College, Bard College at Simon's Rock, the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center, and the city of Pittsfield's Offices of Cultural Development and Community Development, among others.
Talk:
Fragments in the Field
Story Stage
Tessa Kelly, founder of ARCADE, will share the story of The Mastheads, a series of mobile structures conjuring the history of American Renaissance authors in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the project shaped the beginning of their practice as one focused on using design to revive culture and history in post-industrial American cities.